"Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon" [Henry IV, I.ii.31-33]
HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF, BUT IT OFTEN RHYMES
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Otto von Bismarck

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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Fuckwits rule the Church of England, as everyone with a scintilla of gray matter knows. Read the link above to understand why in England and the U.S., where gays and pervs run the Anglican & Episcopal Real Estate Companies, no one attends their services on prime real estate. And why their adherents [in the U.S.] have dropped from 3.8 to 2.5 million in the last decade. In the U.K., it is a government operation, so no one cares if the facilities are used or not.

In the rest of the world, where Anglicans actually practice religion and have some basic moral and spiritual values, the Church is actually expanding. Maybe the Perv-in-Chief in Westminster Abbey should go a little down-market.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Michael Wolff is easily the most repulsive creep on MSNBC or anywhere else, and SNL had a good time torching him and the ineffable cretinous excretion named Olberboy [played by Ben Affleck] when syncophant Wolff didn't quite lick the shoes of Keith-of-a-Thousand-Special-Comments with enough tongue action and cringing deference. Wolff must do something ineffable with Graydon Carter to merit a Vanity Fair job, since his writing style is more lavishly narcissistic than even Hitchens, who in addition has a brain. Here's a few snippets on Wolff from David Carr, the NYT cultural reporter:

Murdoch, for all his lack of an inner life, at least in this book, is an extremely engaging man to listen to. At investor conferences where other media titans drone on defensively, he is far and away the most fearless and factual. But not here. Wolff, who has the columnist’s tic of being far too struck by the fragrance of his own prose, draws attention to the Boswell at the expense of the Johnson.

[emph mine] And another:

Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Here's another Carr introduction to one of Wolff's many lapses in accuracy and honesty:

Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong.

And then proceeds to shred any scintilla remaining of Wolff's "integrity as a reporter," of which he famously has none.

The reason for Wolff's persistent nitwittery and inaccuracy becomes clear in a later graph:

And Wolff also writes that The New York Times canceled a series on Murdoch after two articles were attacked by News Corp. Only two articles were scheduled, and none were canceled, according to the paper’s editors. Wolff prefers the purity of his constructs — one of which is that The Times is a deeply flawed artifact that is doomed to be crushed by the more nimble, less morally constricted Murdoch.

Und so weiter und so fort. Wolff's yapping lapdog attacks on Murdoch are effortlessly put down by Carr and the link above will demonstrate that the NYT, despite many lapses, still has enough self respect to impale an impostor like Wolff despite the fact that Murdoch is no friend of the Times. Wolff will predictably reply by saying that Carr is cadging for a job with Rupert's flagship newspaper in NYC, but I applaud the Sunday Book Review editor for putting Carr's putdown of the scurrilous narcissist Wolff right on the front page.

Humberto Fontova has a great article on the shallow little upper middle-class playboy-adventurer named Che whose exploits are invented and exploited by ultra-left degenerates everywhere.

Fontova displays in great detail the many incredibly inane eff-ups CG managed to get himself in before being cornered by CIA gunmen in a Bolivian jungle begging for mercy because "I'm worth more to you alive than dead" and then getting his just desserts from several automatic rifles that terminated him "with extreme prejudice."

Good riddance to bad rubbish, but one story in a local Miami newspaper a few months back on the sports page caught my attention. The paper was reporting that Cubans still on their island prison were hoping that Raul's taking power would mean that Cubans could play golf again. The backstory is that Che playfully challenged Fidel to a golf match, but forgot to lose. Che was an upper-middle class Argentine who could shoot a mean tee-to-green game, but after he beat the Bearded Whoremonger by many strokes, the upshot was that Castro closed all the golf courses on the island except one for diplomats. The Hairy Megalomaniac [who reportedly screamed at Khrushchev during the Cuban Missle Crisis to initiate a nuclear war regardless of the consequences] was, is and ever shall be one of the most autistic moral lepers on the planet, and if he couldn't play golf well, no one else on his Prospero's Cell would play at all---or so the Herald or Sun-Sentinel reporter attests.

I would have loved to interrogate CG after his capture in the same manner that he employed on Freedom Fighters caught by Castro's criminals. But of course, that would make the ultra-left whiners and loo-zers [Harry Reid, etc.] run to Amnesty International and the UN and file a lawsuit with putty-headed judges somewhere on the two Left Coasts.

Igor Panarin has the ear of Vlad The Empoisoner Putin, I'll bet, with his frightful predictions of the imminent demise of the USA. This is not the first time that ignorant Eurotrash has predicted the US is a house of cards, since the rigid and sclerotic statist mentality cannot understand American freedoms, mistaking them for anarchy. Read the WSJ article for a few chuckles and raising-eyebrow exercises!

Free Republic prints the original Novosti article with this delicious extended hallucination:

Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."

On the fate of the U.S. dollar, he said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar. The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."

and then notes at the end:

Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare. [my emph.]

Looks like Tovarich Panarin needs to reassess his basic information input sources before fantasizing in public, but it should be a warning that know-nothing nudniks like Panarin are actually in positions of influence in Putin's attempt to Stalinize Russia after a KGB elite completes its takeover.

Huntington is famous for a number of ground-breaking perspectives, well annotated and roundly criticized by ultra-left airheads like Edward Said, on the shifting realities on the ground of global political movements. PC leftists and "new" Democrats routinely castigate Huntington, who worked in the Carter NSC, for not reciting their rote anodyne nostrums and signing on to bogus "Davos Man" elitism. [SPH coined the term of the other-worldly haute politique of detached condescension practiced by the EU faineants [and their obsequious allies in the US MSM like Tiny Tom Friedman].

Most recently, Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order was a dose of realism and his knowledge of the persistence of ancient codes and antagonism into the post-Cold War order, contrasting with Francis Fukuyama's sunny and blithe Pollyanna tome, The End of History and the Last Man. 911 blatantly punctuated Huntington's thesis with a bloody exclamation mark!

SPH's masterful writings on The Third Wave and Hispanicization of parts of America earned him the enmity of know-nothing ultra lefties who will dutifully trash this Magister Ludi of late twentieth century political thinking.

Tom Friedman is a total con man, writing books about the obvious while peddling snake oil and BS. His latest canard is a gasoline tax hike, to make our country more like the Europe this buffoon should move to. TF forgets, or is too effing stupid to know, that large countries the size of the USA, Australia, Canada [even Canada!], and Russia all have low gas taxes because of large distances to be travelled to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Such a practical thought would never enter the tiny mind of Arab-bashing Jew-boy Friedman, who brings the Saudis in as the comic book villain. He cites a left-wing moron to make his point:

There has to be a system that permanently changes consumer demand, which would permanently change what Detroit makes, which would attract more investment in battery technology to make electric cars, which would hugely help the expansion of the wind and solar industries — where the biggest drawback is the lack of batteries to store electrons when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. A higher gas tax would drive all these systemic benefits.

The same is true in geopolitics. A gas tax reduces gasoline demand and keeps dollars in America, dries up funding for terrorists and reduces the clout of Iran and Russia at a time when Obama will be looking for greater leverage against petro-dictatorships. It reduces our current account deficit, which strengthens the dollar. It reduces U.S. carbon emissions driving climate change, which means more global respect for America. And it increases the incentives for U.S. innovation on clean cars and clean-tech.

Which one of these things wouldn’t we want? A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”

Although the above paras are chock-a-block with received opinions and fixed ideas such as the totally discredited Global Warming Hoax, Friedman finally goes over the top to cite Mandelbaum's little socialistic tax-hike to boost "prosperity" when gas price rises have historically hindered prosperity and caused the economy to slow down.

Not that one of the prime freakshows on the NYT's Op-Ed page featuring cretins like Krugman and Herbert and the occasionally readable Dowd ever really thinks about anything. Read his recent line about the Jetsons and the Flintstones which trope he has used, according to WSJ debunker James Taranto, at least a half-dozen times in the last three years.

Always wrong, but never in doubt, Friedman sells books to half-educated housewives and males with housewives' brains.

Every con man has his day, but Friedman is the Bernie Madoff of journalism.

Christopher Booker announces the demise of the late and unlamented Global Warming Hoax, because

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

such as the sudden disappearance of the Late Middle Ages Warming Period when French vines grew all over southern England and wine was produced in northern locations which now are sadly consigned to grain brews like beer and vodka! A fiddling with the statistics produced a hockey stick graph showing ever-increasing warming trend since the beginning of historically recorded weather observations. All this was engineered by politically-active "scientists" like a NASA fraud named Hanson and his Stanford colleague, demonstrating the havoc that can be wrought by snake oil salesmen with PhDs.

These two pranksters collected a cohort of conniving grant-hounds who were given money by moronic politicians like the buffoon Al Gore, who got a D+ on his only science course, one he took in Divinity School!! The Gore-bot is actually dumber than he sounds [if that were possible!], but clever enough and advised by political Ponzi scheme cabalists that if a critical mass of "climatologists" and other usual suspects could be suborned, the hitherto peripheral attacks at corporate capitalism might be forged into a frontal assault at capitalism itself, under the guise of "saving the planet." The dumbest people in the world, Norwegians, agreed and gave the Gore-bot a Nobel Prize for his illiterate windpuffery such as "the science is settled." Gore fits in with the crowd that in the '70s was howling at the moon about a new Ice Age and the advance of the glaciers---which will probably occur in about 10,000 years according to honest scientists, as we are now in the middle of an interglacial warming spell.

Don't count on clowns like the UN and the EU and "media pundits" to back off from the fake "science" that the Global Warming hallucination represents.

In for a penny, in for a pound..... the crooked politicians are blind being led by one-eyed "climatologists". Clear-eyed 20-20 scientists without special interests in grabbing grants for specious spurious pre-cooked chicanery financed by crooked pols and bogus organizations like the Democratic Party. And gullible RINOs like McCain, the fool who was so repellent that he allowed Obama to win Ohio even though Barack won Ohio with 40,000 FEWER votes than John Kerry, who lost the state to GWB by over one hundred thousand votes.

But John-Boy is now joining the great GW daisy chain to keep alive his slot on late-night talk shows and the occasional cameo in comic movies. I think this bozo has finally found his true niche, a stand-up comic.

So far, Obama isn't doing too badly, but if he listens to Robert Kennedy Jr., another political fraud, he is bound to be misled. Thank God he appeared to distance himself from Clinton's odious Veep.UPDATECanadafreepress.com has a list of the worst Global Warming Whoppers among the lies and disinformation disseminated by the lying Luddites of the ultra-left GoreWhores:

“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:” The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008, Hurricanes, Arctic Ice, Coral, Drinking water, Aspen skiing

We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter—but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976–1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year in the last 100.

But sunspots had been predicting major cooling since 2000, and global temperatures turned downward in early 2007. The sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s thermometers since 1860. Today’s temperatures are about on a par with 1940. For 2008, the Almanac hired a new climatologist, Joe D’Aleo, who says the declining sunspots and the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean predict 25-30 years of cooler temperatures for the planet.

“You could potentially sail, kayak or even swim to the North Pole by the end of the summer. Climate scientists say that the Arctic ice . . . is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.” Ted Alvarez, Backpacker Magazine Blogs, June, 2008.

Soon after this prediction, a huge Russian icebreaker got trapped in the thick ice of the Northwest Passage for a full week. The Arctic ice hadn’t melted in 2007, it got blown into warmer southern waters. Now it’s back. (Reference)

Remember too the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. Polish climatologist Rajmund Przbylak says “the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s” based on more than 40 Arctic temperature stations.

“Australia’s Cities Will Run Out of Drinking Water Due to Global Warming.”

Tim Flannery was named Australia’s Man of the Year in 2007—for predicting that Australian cities will run out of water. He predicted Perth would become the “first 21st century ghost city,’ and that Sydney would be out of water by 2007. Today however, Australia’s city reservoirs are amply filled. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun reminds us Australia is truly a land of long droughts and flooding rains.

“Hurricane Effects Will Only Get Worse.” Live Science, September 19, 2008.

So wrote the on-line tech website Live Science, but the number of Atlantic hurricanes 2006–2008 has been 22 percent below average, with insured losses more than 50 percent below average. The British Navy recorded more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes in the last part of the Little Ice Age (1700–1850) as during the much-warmer last half of the 20th century.

“Corals will become increasingly rare on reef systems.” Dr. Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, head of Queensland University (Australia) marine studies.

In 2006, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg warned that high temperatures might kill 30–40 percent of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef “within a month.” In 2007, he said global warming temperatures were bleaching [potentially killing] the reef.

But, in 2008, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said climate change had not damaged the “well-managed” reef in the four years since its last report. Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.

Aspen’s study predicted global warming would change the climate to resemble hot, dry Amarillo, Texas. But in 2008, European ski resorts opened a month early, after Switzerland recorded more October snow than ever before. Would-be skiers in Aspen had lots of winter snow—but a chill factor of 18 below zero F. kept them at their fireplaces instead of on the slopes. *Sources:

Predictions of 25-30 year cooling due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation: Scafetta and West, 2006, “Phenomenological Solar Signature in 400 Years of Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere Temperature Record,” Geophysical Research Letters.

Arctic Warmer in the 1930s: R. Przybylak, 2000, “Temporal and Spatial Variation of Surface Air Temperature over the Period of Instrumental Observation in the Arctic,” International Journal of Climatology 20.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Greece remains the moral leper colony of the EU, and that's saying a lot given the caliber of cowardly insouciance normal to countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and France under Chirac [not omitting Deutschland with its sausage-eating cannibals]. She sums up the Greek situation vis-a-vis the EU:

...the riots' relative absence from European and North American front pages proves that—the rhetoric of European unity aside—not all European countries are taken equally seriously. Although they are members of the European Union, the Greeks' major contribution to European foreign policy is their stubborn insistence (for reasons truly too complex to repeat here) on blocking international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia unless it changes its name to FYROM—the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—an acronym that everybody else finds laughable. On the domestic front, the Greeks are best known for having faked the economic data they needed in order to join the euro currency.

I once spent an evening at dinner with the son of Greek PM Papandreou, head of PASOK, while he was Prime Minister and young Nikos explained to me and my Greek-heritage wife the way a system of corruption worked throughout Greece from the smallest town to the large regional capitals. He said the country was completely balkanized [Robert Kagan alludes to this in his book The Balkans and not in a federal sense or even local loyalty sense. Just atomized.

Applebaum elaborates:

There may also be other, more local, explanations for why these riots feel as if they are taking place so far away from mainstream events. Greek political scientist Stathis Kalyvas argues brilliantly that they are facilitated by Greece's unique political culture: In the years since it overthrew military rule, the Greek political class has come to treat civil disobedience, even violent and destructive civil disobedience, as "almost always justified, if not glorified." Rioting is a "fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage"; the anarchist subculture that thrives in central Athens is "abetted, and in some instances endorsed" by Greece's left-wing parties and mainstream newspapers.And yet—even if Greece is unserious, even if anarchist subculture has uniquely deep roots in Athens, even if Greek corruption and youth unemployment are unusually high—it's a mistake to dismiss these riots as altogether peripheral. If nothing else, they show what can happen to a highly developed, post-ideological society where organized politics no longer interests large groups of people. One sympathizer says the rioters can be divided into three groups: communists, anarchists, and "younger people who like to think that they are anarchists but … don't know what they stand for. They are the ones who have been looting … they feel the only way to make themselves heard is to do these things."

Another describes the anarchist world of Exharia, approvingly, as "a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas." Yet another told a reporter that the tiny shops near the university deserved to be looted because they represent "the corporate machine." The thinking here isn't exactly sophisticated: This is a revolution, among other things, being conducted to the strains of Pink Floyd ("We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control"). Some are also blaming the weakness of Greece's mainstream social democrats, who, like social democrats elsewhere in Europe, have lately lost ground to the further left and are having trouble attracting young people. But I'm guessing the problem runs even deeper: The fact is that political parties in general are weak everywhere, and democracy is therefore weak, too.

The center cannot hold and a motley moron group like Pink Floyd floats like a pig over rioting looters exhibiting "Rage Against the Machine."

Happily, even the EU comical cavalcade of clowns is above the silliness of Greece devolving into its mindless constituencies. Wonder if Victor Davis Hanson can update his War Like No Other to update Thucydides on the civil strife going on now in the EU's leper colony.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Hairplugs eat away at politicians' brains and Joe The Fraud Biden is no exception....this tightwad with donations marched his poor wife to a homeless shelter to fake concern for the homeless. The fact that this dolt is ten times dumber than Sarah Palin is eventually becoming slowly evident and the MSM will have another reason to be ignored in the future.

Biden's phony smile and lying mouth both typify the Dem hypocrisy.....even the NYT's gasbag do-gooder Nicolas Kristof had to admit last week that the average "liberal" is just as phony as Biden, pretending concern for the poor and powerless while donating zilch. They want to get their hands on other people's money, for charity, for taxes, for their hedge funds like Bernie Made-off and will do anything to try to trick the voters into thinking they actually care.

And sometimes their chicanery actually works....! The Dem constituency is either barely literate or completely puffed up with the pretensions of academicide. The stupids won this time. Or, as in Minnesota, the criminal judiciary and criminal state government is stealing an election in broad daylight while the feckless Guv'nr Pawlenty sucks his thumb.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Read this link and ask yourself if it isn't time to eliminate not only the so-called "rogue" elements, but the entire superstructure of the Gaza genocidal enterprise whose feelings for the Jews and Israel mirror the Channel 4 "Christmas" spokesperson invited to spew vomit on a Christian celebration.

Take out Londonistan while you're eliminating the nearby terrorist enclave run by Hamas. You've got my vote.

UPDATE The lepers in Cairo are fuming that Israel answers incessant rocket attacks with overwhelming force. Why didn't the feckless impotent shemales in the Arab League do anything to curb Hamas? I see the EU and the UN are among the hyenas circling Israel as the culprit. Hope Obama stays as strong as GWB on defending a democracy living among oligarchic praetorian elite-run totalitarian states.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

John O'Sullivan has been exiled to Radio Liberty in Prague, but writes about the media-assassination attempts on Sarah Palin, with Mrs. Andrew Sullivan leading the knickers-in-a-twist mafia and follows with a comparison:

They are far from identical; they rose in different political systems requiring different skills. As a parliamentarian, Mrs. Thatcher needed forensic and debating skills which her training in Oxford politics and as a tax lawyer gave her. Mrs. Palin is a good speaker, but she needs to hone her debating tactics if she is to match those of the Iron Lady.

On the other hand, Mrs. Palin rose in state politics to jobs requiring executive ability. Her successful conduct of the negotiations with Canada, Canadian provinces and American states over the Alaska pipeline was a larger executive task than anything handled by Mrs. Thatcher until she entered the Cabinet and, arguably, until she became prime minister.

Funny how Palin got bombarded while a cretinous hair-plug refugee who claimed Hezbollah had been evicted from Lebanon escaped all MSM scrutiny---even as he inserted his foot in his mouth with metronomic regularity.

I hope O'Sullivan's article helps the WSJ recover from having bi-yotch-in-chief ambassadress to the Upper West Side Noonan's ridiculous display of feminist bitchery. Yeah, and her pen-pal ditto-head K. Parker can insert her head up a place where the sun never shines!

Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Pursuit of Glory is one of those rare history books which has a delight on every page, like Braudel's The Mediterranean. Author Tim Blanning quotes Marxists like Eric Hogsbawm and Walter Benjamin often, but doesn't show some leg except a bit with the papacy and the Catholic Church, but as a Brit, that can be excused. Early on, the author does note that medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode. The inventions of watches and timetables in Holland were beginning to make time a commodity.

A quote from a review brings up the novel introduction of "public space," which began in England as public opinion separated the privacy of family from the overweening interference of the state [with forced labor in England and corvees in France, to name a couple of examples of the tax-with-impunity interference which rarely returned actual benefits from the state.

""Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion." Countries where this public sphere was left free, as in Britain or the Dutch Republic, tended to be more politically stable than, say, France, where suppression ended in bloody revolution."

The book only covers 1648-1815, but the French Revolution introduced the "concierge" in each building in Paris to vouch for the political correctness of its inhabitants during The Terror and other revolutionary inventions. An early example of "public space" monitoring the opinions of the citizens of the state even in the familial household.

Nowadays, we see "privacy" becoming a rare commodity itself, as public space continues to invade the family in one way or another. However, "Time's Arrow" does not move forward, as we have seen many times since 1789, and that wheel of fortune keeps disobeying the Eric Hobsbawm and the other disciples of the worst economist in human history.

UPDATEReading Erich Heller's The Importance of Nietzsche, I was struck by the point Heller makes on p. 5 about the "Death of God" which Nietzsche called "the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger," as Heller puts it. EH goes on to say:

Note well the paradox contained in these words. He never said that there was no God, but that the Eternal had been vanquished by Time and that the Immortal suffered death at the hands of mortals."

Perhaps this is a paraphrase of the mini-thought above that "medieval concepts of [what he calls "messianic"]time were slowly evolving from the old "Fortune's Wheel" which always returns to where it began to "the arrow of time" relentlessly going forward in a "progressive" don't-look-back mode." Heller goes on to quote Nietzsche's Will to Power to state:

The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries...For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intesity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection....Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist." [no. 2, 57]

And Nietzsche ain't talking about Global Warming or some natural catastrophe, a force majeure of nature. Heller expatiates on Nietzsche's vision of the aftermath of the Death of God and the seizure of power by "reformers of society."

...Men have become enemies, and each his own enemy. From now onward they will hate, Nietzsche believes, however many comforts they will lavish upon themselves, and hate themselves with a new hatred, unconsciously at work in the depths of their souls. True, there will be ever better reformers of society, ever better socialists, and ever better hospitals, and an ever increasing intolerance of pain and poverty and suffering and death, and an ever more fanatical craving for the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Yet the deepest impulse informing their striving will not be love and will not be compassion. Its true source will be the panic-struck determination not to have to ask the question "What is the meaning of our lives?"---the question that will remind them of the death of God.....Rather than allowing that question to be asked, they will do everything to smooth it away from the face of humanity.....For they cannot endure it and yet they will despise themselves for not enduring it, and for their guilt-ridden inability to answer it; and their self-hatred will betray them behind the back of their apparent charity and humanitarian concern. For there they will assiduously construct the tools for the annihilation of human kind. "There will be wars such as have never been waged on earth," says Nietzsche in Ecce Homo and in the notes to Thus Spake Zarathustra, "I foresee something terrible, Chaos everywhere. Nothing will be left of any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt!"

[emphasis in original text]

Heller goes on to say that the fragments above from the notes of his late years "give a surprisingly full diagnosis of what he termed nihilism, the state of human beings and societies faced with a total eclipse of all values." As Stephen R.C. Hicks correctly notes frequently in Explaining Postmodernism, although regarded as a hero by shallow postmodernist nihilists, Nietzsche is a deep humanist and abhors the destruction of values and even calls the clever nihilists "waeklings" and victims of a "slave mentality," as they rationalize their inferior positions in society [professors, journalists, petty functionaries, actors, community organizers, etc.] whose "curdled bitterness" curls up and lashes out at the strong, i.e., those whose values permit them to be happy and generous [read Nicholas Kristof's NYT editorial] instead of weakly whining that wealthy people should be impelled to give through taxes that which these weak hypocrites are unwilling to give themselves, although beating their puny sunken chests in self-praise of their own generous intentions. As Hicks notes:

Socialism is the historical loser and ... socialists...hate that fact, they....hate the winners for having won, and the ...hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate [as Nietzsche noted above,my comment]is a chronic condition [that] leads to an urge to destroy. ........ Postmodern thinkers hold that...everything has failed....

[p. 194, Hicks, op. cit.]My guess as Obama keeps a centrist course in the current crisis, the ultra-left nihilists will continue to maintain their Chicken Little jeremiads as they display their slave mentality and their weakness, the weakness of loo-zers! Though they believe they are launching a crusade, their Pied Piper is the New York Times and they themselves are appropriately the tiny rodents being musically herded out of Hamelin [Gotham City]!

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Caroline Kennedy is regarded as unqualified to be a senator by 63% of New Yorkers, unless the poll which says only 37% think she is also has the usual "don't knows" to offset the skeptics. Only 16% believe that name recognition has nothing to do with her candidacy.

Sarah Palin was pilloried by the elites because the Upper West Side punditry which the Me Too boondock editorial hacks mindlessly echo whenever Pravda on the Hudson signals the Party Line feared and detested the Will of the People, which in poll after poll has demonstrated is against Open Border and for Offshore Drilling. Ditto Californians who are against gay marriage, but are opposed by "Those Who Know Better" and seek to overturn the popular will by judicial tyranny---the new tyranny of the minority now in fashion. The Oprahfied Nanny-crat Elites fear and hate any real will of the people.

I just finished a long set of bios by Graham Robb on the lives of Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo [and Arthur Rimbaud]. In chapter after chapter, whenever politics in France reared its head, Paris went left and the provinces went right. But the provinces, numerically ten times more populous than Paris, never seemed to have its will made writ of the land.

Methinks the USA is becoming a monarchy-without-a-king as our Founders feared, just like France and the backward autocracies of Europe.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Colin Powell and F. Zakaria had a cabal out loud and C.P. outed himself as just another ex-Oreo.

I wonder if this doofus ever listened to Rush L. in the first place. Limbaugh is a symbol of what spineless libtards hate, and they never listen to his pearls of wisdom, preferring their own socialist bromides----proved by history not to work in any country with more than 20 million people. And where does this bogus RINO come up with his demographic delusionary predictions, unless of course he's counting [hoping for?] on a flood of illegal immigrants.

Zakaria is a clever fellow whose book is clogged with unforced errors due to reliance on dubious stats gleaned from a dishonest media. The guy should dig deeper before pontificating on issues like the Global Warming Hoax. No moral character, just a smart version of Al Gore.

Mark Shieldson PBS Lehrer News had an interesting pair of contributions today. Despite his tiresome class-warfare bitchery, Shields told Lehrer and Brooks that the person to thank for Patrick Fitzgerald's MOR prosecutorial zeal was former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald [no relation] who insisted after the 2000 election of GWB that the chief Fed prosecutor in Chicago be an "outsider," citing the precedent of the fellow who finally nailed Al Capone, a guy named Eliot Ness.

In a strange coincidence back at the end of the nineties, my wife, daughter & I ran into Sen. Fitzgerald at a west-side gas station in Chicago on a trip to pick up a cat from a small town near Rockford where Dem superlawyer David Boies [who was to head the team that lost Florida on behalf of Al Gore in 2000] was born. I told Sen. Peter that my wife had worked for Sen. Sarbanes & told my nine-year old daughter, who is now studying Poli-Sci at UMiami, that the Cadillac SUV was being driven by a U.S. Senator.

Shields pointed out the honorable integrity of Peter Fitzgerald, a rare quality among Illinois politicians, and that Fitzgerald resigned on a matter of principle in 2004 and allowed Obama to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Patrick Fitzgerald, of course, did indict and convict Scooter Libby on a jumped-up case in Plamegate, but now is distinguishing himself by outing the stupid crook Blagojevich.

Just how stupid is Blago-bitch? Despite being elected to three terms to the House of Reps, the autistic Illinois guv'nr believes he has the power to appoint the successor to Rahm Emmanuel. [In another obiter dictum, Rahm and my daughter shared the same baby-sitter, albeit thirty years apart! Chicago politics tends to be chummy!] No, Rod, Congresspeople are always chosen by special elections, almost as dumb as Donovan McNabb not knowing that you can have a tie in an NFL game!]

Shields did come up with an interesting suggestion---appoint Patrick Fitzgerald Senator to close out the term, he has no political affiliations and could actually be better than a partisan like Atty Gen'l Lisa Madigan, now far ahead of "Candidate 5" who happens to be J.Jackson Jr.

And it looks like the flap over Blago and his clumsy feckless behavior has effectively eliminated Caroline Kennedy's chances to be appointed to Senator from NY to take over Hillary's seat. Or Bill Clinton's chances, as he has a few skeletons in his closet!!

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Another Journalist lies close to death in the murderous campaign the Putin "Neue Ordnung" is arranging for the working press as Vlad The Empoisoner again demonstrates that his hero Joe "Stalin" Djugashvili inspires him to extrajudicial executions that the American MSM, obsessed with its dervish hashish dreams, ignores---Bushitler is obviously behind this, but the MSM still can't find that journalistic link.

Thus Sayeth Pat Forde in his ESPN analysis of the BSC National Championship, which will pit the Heisman final two QB candidates against each other in a "fight, not flight" brand of football.

Given U. Miami's current slump, Florida is my default team and Tebow an overarching casting choice for real-life superman. But I'm reading Sally Jenkins' book "Real All Americans" about the 1903 game between Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indians and Army. Football came out of the "muscular Christianity" movement of the post-Civil War Gilded Age shift from Parkman's 1890 loss of the frontier and the increasing mechanization and electrification of America. Walter Camp laid down the rules as "an exercise of social Darwinism and military science." Unlike rugby with its British honor system of self-policing, football needed referees as the unique American pushing the envelope required on-site adjudification on every play. In the 1890s, College football exploded into popularity in the same period baseball went big-time professional. But here's Pat Forde:

Thus we welcome two runaway freight trains to Titletown, where the head-on collision figures to be intense. Florida's average score since the Ole Miss loss: 50-13. Oklahoma's average: 60-29.

In addition to pairing two red-hot and dominant teams, there are some other juicy subplots to latch onto.

• Florida has played 1,053 games in its history, and Oklahoma has played 1,140. Yet they've never played each other. Let the two peacock-proud fan bases commence jawing.

• One coach, either Meyer or Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, will become the first to win a second BCS title.

Meyer returns to his second championship game in three years, continuing his even-year run as king of the football universe. In 2004, Meyer took Utah to an undefeated season and Fiesta Bowl victory, which earned him the upgrade to Gainesville. In 2006, his Gators trampled unbeaten Ohio State to win the crystal football. And now in '08 he's back again.

Stoops made his mark in the business sooner than Meyer, guiding Oklahoma to the 2000 national championship. Since then the Sooners have been annually excellent -- with the glaring exception of BCS bowl games. They've lost four straight, all of them with embarrassment attached.

• We could have a face-off of Heisman Trophy winners for just the second time. (Oklahoma was involved in the other one as well, when 2003 winner Jason White flopped against '04 winner Matt Leinart in a 55-19 USC romp.)

Bradford's ancestors may have had some of that Native American blood that made Jim Thorpe the greatest all-round athlete the US has ever produced. Tebow is a "one in a billion" combination of athlete skills and moral character. Alabama has a great team, and next year might bring a rematch, if both can survive the briar patch of SEC smashmouth defense and soaring offense. Oklahoma lives in a Big 12 where offense trumps defense and the there is a mismatch between the two conference divisions that, in Forde's words "(The only thing more lopsided than the Big 12 divisions is Quasimodo.)" Texas and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State all should be BCS contestants in a fairer world. I'll finish off with more from Forde:

"This," Meyer said, "will go down as one of the great wins in Florida football history."

It gives Florida a chance to play one more game of historic import this season, against an Oklahoma team that shares an attribute with the Gators. When faced with adversity, both chose fight over flight.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

John Fund in today's WSJ has a short piece on how the dishonest porn lizard who commandeered Harvard students and used Harvard stationery to write one of his unfunny books [imagine if a Repub candidate had done that, he would have been Borked and Palinized by the ultra-left MSM right out of the race] is now in the race until a count of votes shows he's ahead, and then the recount stops.

Truth be said, Minnesota had two lousy candidates for Senator, both Jews from Brooklyn NY, and in a better world, the independent would have won. But between the two, Coleman is far less lousy than the putrid carrion-eating hyena [a female-dominated animal whose matriarchs are jammed full of testoserone] named Franken. Only a state who sent Jesse Ventura to the Governor's Mansion is loony enough to send a potty-mouthed libtard like Franken to the Senate, although this southern extension of Canada deserves one of the worst Senators in the country.

Richard Yates was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s favorite American contemporary novelist. Vonnegut told me so in a booze-soaked party in Sag Harbor after I mentioned that I had a long conversation with Yates a few years before when he was academic advisor at Boston U. for my sister-in-law and somehow ended up with me and my mother-in-law in their Lincoln, MA basement talking about everything. Christopher Hitchens, with whom I shared many booze-soaked afternoons in the Iron Gate restaurant across from where I worked at the Middle East Institute, reviews the movie coming out this Christmas in The Atlantic Monthly.

My memories of Yates were of a guy who wanted to understand the people he was talking to and about while he chain-smoked. His big failing was not getting the academic postmark of a college degree or even time at school after his stint in WWII. But I read Cold Spring Harbor and found he was a natural observer of human nature in the raw circumstances of everyday life. Christopher H. remains a sort of Dirk Bogarde of the mind, endlessly facile and epigrammatic, but not very substantial, as his review of the book [and it is evident that he probably hasn't seen the movie] skips along the surface---which given the subject of suburban life, is probably appropriate.

L'affaire Damien Green indicates how far the UK has gone down the road to Bureaucratic Authoritarianism as it lurches toward Bethlehem to be reincarnated as a socialist nanny-nazi bureaucratic prison just like its continental EU partners in mediocrity.

Gordon Brown would resign if he had a notochord. This jellyfish keeps drifting like a Portuguese Man O'War toward symbiosis with Vlad [The Empoisoner] Putin in Moscow.

Monday, December 01, 2008

The WSJ has an article by Dorothy Rabinovitch describing several CNN interviews of the noted Indian GI tract expert who points to the USA as the cause of the bloodshed in Mumbai.

......commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. [my emph] Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Of course, Dr. Chopra has long ago abandoned complicated thought processes like "cause and effect" and of course, examining the fanatical religious woman-bashers and fundamentalist fascisms they adhere to. Perps' complaints and demands are never subjected by Deepak to the light of cold historical reasoning---that tedious obstacle to simplicity and reductionist Oprahfications on the road to Nirvana. Logic and reasoning hamper the good Doctor's serene reduction of complexities to a single unity. Larry King has already arrived at Deepak's end zone of continuous contemplation of the clash of opposites, always reducing such disturbances to the world's one and only source of evil, located in Washington D.C.

I for one believe Deepak should stick to cleansing bowels and ingesting garlic and ginger to facilitate our journey ere we shuffle off this mortal coil! Or perhaps he could be given a seat on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's meteorological Global Warming Cte. in the Obama Green Cabinet to help ward off the inevitable melting of the polar icecaps. Al needs all the advice and help he can get.

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"''I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now: I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind....' Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon."
Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there’s no human life at the full or the dark. From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim’s most difficult...An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress....Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.